The objective of the study was to determine the spatial variation in modern contraceptive use and unmet need for family planning across the counties of Kenya and to examine whether the spatial patterns were associated with inequalities in physical access to health facilities. Data were obtained from the 2008-2009 Kenya Demographic and Health Survey and linked to the location of health facilitie...

When a spatial point process is observed through a bounded window, edge eeects hamper the estimation of characteristics such as the empty space function F , the nearest neighbour distance distribution G, and the second order moment function K. Here we propose and study product-limit type estimators of F; G and K based on the analogy with censored survival data: the distance from a xed point to ...

In this paper, the problem of classifying an unseen pattern on the basis of its nearest neighbors in a recorded data set is addressed from the point of view of Dempster-Shafer theory. Each neighbor of a sample to be classified is considered as an item of evidence that supports certain hypotheses regarding the class membership of that pattern. The degree of support is defined as a function of th...

The three-state agent-based 2D model of nancial markets in the version proposed by Giulia Iori in 2002 has been herein extended. We have introduced the increase of herding behaviour by modelling the altering trust of an agent in his nearest neighbours. The trust increases if the neighbour has foreseen the price change correctly and the trust decreases in the opposite case. Our version only slig...

We investigate the problem of approximate similarity (nearest neighbor) search in high-dimensional metric spaces, and describe how the distance distribution of the query object can be exploited so as to provide probabilistic guarantees on the quality of the result. This leads to a new paradigm for similarity search, called PAC-NN (probably approximately correct nearest neighbor) queries, aiming...

The i-vector model is widely used by the state-of-the-art speaker recognition system. We proposed a new Mahalanobis metric scoring learned from weighted pairwise constraints (WPCML), which use the different weights for the empirical error of the similar and dissimilar pairs. In the new i-vector space described by the metric, the distance between the same speaker’s i-vectors is small, while that...

Comparing and ranking information is an important topic in social and information sciences, and in particular on the web. Its objective is to measure the difference of the preferences of voters on a set of candidates and to compute a consensus ranking. Commonly, each voter provides a total order of all candidates. In this work we consider the generalization of total orders and bucket orders to ...

This paper presents the development of fuzzy‐ appearance manifold and fuzzy‐nearest distance calculation in the eigenspace domain for pose estimation of degraded face images. In order to obtain a robust pose estimation system which can deal with the fuzziness of face data caused by statistical errors, we proposed the fuzzy‐vector representation in eigenspace domain of the...